The Peacock Cloak

fountain pen. This pretty little girl is my sister, Clarrie, in her new red coat and fluffy earmuffs. She looks a bit blurred because she is doing a pirouette. She has just pushed my father’s arm up into that position, rather as if he were a tailor’s dummy and she is pirouetting round and round beneath it, while he thinks about something else. She would have been seven.
    We’re in Piccadilly Circus, on the steps at the foot of the statue of Eros. Behind us are the famous lights. They were quite wonderful: reckless waves of colour sweeping across vast arrays of electric bulbs to summon into brilliant existence the giant logos of global corporations – Coca-Cola, TDK, Sanyo, Cinzano – more vivid and numinous and beautiful, surely, than any religious icon in history.
    Incredible folly, blind recklessness, it all now seems – blazing electric light for no purpose at all except advertising and decoration – but it was a golden age, one of the pinnacles of history. We lived in an empire of light and plenty, fuelled by the ancient energy of ancient suns stored up over millions of years and burned up by us in one great glorious hundred-year binge.
    “Round and round the garden,” sings out my sister for the tenth time, putting on even more of a baby voice, and turning up the volume to VERY LOUD. She glances at my dad with a mixture of defiance and longing and contempt.
    She is being silly. She is being annoying. She is doing it on purpose. Dad’s face is taut with the agony of being kept from his world of abstract thought. If there was a deeper despair there than I’d noticed on previous visits, well, I couldn’t see it then and, to be truthful, I still can’t see it now, even looking at the pictures with all my knowledge of what was to follow.
    “You’re being a bit annoying Clarrie,” I muttered.
    Now, from this long perspective, I see something heroic in Clarrie’s refusal to give up on the possibility of getting our father’s attention, or on the possibility that there might be fun here to be had. There was something heroic about my sister. There was then, and there continued to be, until the day she died. No matter what, she insisted on her right to her own space in the world. She insisted on her right to be noticed and heard.
    But then I couldn’t bear it if anyone was not as attentive to my father’s moods and responses as I was. The slightest smile from him and I would redouble my efforts at whatever I was doing to win his favour. The slightest frown, the slightest hint of boredom, and I would either end what I was doing at once, or, in the event that politeness required me to finish what I was saying, I would double the speed of my delivery so as to waste the absolute minimum of his precious time, gabbling to get the words out before I’d lost his attention altogether.
    “I’m not being annoying,” Clarrie said. “ You are. You are. You are.”
    Snap. Dad winced.
    We only saw our father four times a year. We lived in Yorkshire then, in a little bohemian town with my beautiful artistic mother and a steady succession of her lovers. Dad was a mandarin, a senior civil servant. They’d split up soon after Clarrie’s birth. At the time I took this photo, Dad was assistant Permanent Secretary in the Department of Strategic Planning. He lived on his own in a bachelor flat in Kensington, and we came down by train to spend the weekend with him a few times a year. We and he were almost complete strangers to one another.
    “Round and round the garden,” yelled Clarrie, yanking at Dad’s hand to try and get him to join in, to respond, to do at least something to register that he was alive and that he had noticed that she was there. I think she would have been glad even if he had lost his temper with her. Even that would have been preferable to this bland indifference, letting her use his clean dry mandarin’s hand as a fulcrum for her frantic pirouette while he considered the faraway important things that only mandarins understand.
    “Round and round the garden, Dad,” she yelled.
    “Round and round the garden?” says Dad at length, stirring himself from his state of trance. “Round and round the garden, eh, Clarrie? Time I got you two back in the warm, I’d say. It’s a bit chilly now for round and round the garden here, wouldn’t you say? A bit chilly for little girls.”
    He releases her hand. We cross the road. We head for the underground station.
    Snap, snap. Here is the big SANYO